Women, what women?
by digby
538 breaks down what happened with women voters in the midterms. It’s not pretty for the Republicans. They don’t seem tocare much so maybe that’s fine:
Democratic women did really well last Tuesday. And many broke new ground: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won a New York U.S. House seat, is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Rashida Tlaib, who won in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, and Ilhan Omar, of the Minnesota 5th, will be the first Muslim women to serve in Congress. Women also flipped districts blue in competitive races — Navy veteran Elaine Luria won in the Virginia 2nd, and former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin, who served in the Obama administration, won in the Michigan 8th.
According to ABC News projections and FiveThirtyEight analysis, 113 women U.S. House and Senate candidates — from both parties — are expected to be winners.1 And there are eight unresolved races with at least one woman candidate.2 The number of women winners is certain to grow to 115, because both of the major-party candidates in two of the unresolved races are women. In the other six races, two of the women candidates are favored to win — Republicans Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi’s Senate runoff and Mia Love in Utah’s 4th District — according to FiveThirtyEight’s analysis.
Regardless, the 116th Congress will feature the largest class of female legislators ever. But there’s a sharp divide across party lines in this historic first. Of the 113 projected women winners, 98 are Democrats, and 15 are Republicans. (They will be joining 10 female senators who weren’t up for election this year: six Democrats and four Republicans.) It’s a sober reminder that this standout year for women is mostly a standout year for Democratic women.
But this is not necessarily a new trend. According to data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, the Democratic Party has historically elected more women to Congress than the GOP has. Even though at least 123 women will make up the 116th Congress, only 19 — or 15 percent — will be Republicans.
That’s down from 27 percent in the 115th Congress, according to the center. So why are so few Republican women elected to Congress? We’ve looked at this question in-depth before the 2018 midterm elections, but it’s worth revisiting in the wake of 2018 to better understand the dynamics that have led to fewer Republican women running for office and the underlying reasons as to why.
According to data collected by the Center for American Women and Politics, 63 percent of
the women who ran in Senate and House primaries from 1992 through 2018 were Democrats. In every election during that period, there were more women candidates in Democratic primaries than in Republican ones (although the numbers were fairly close in 2010, when 145 Republican women ran and 153 Democratic women ran). The largest difference was in this election cycle, when 73 percent of the women who ran in the primaries were Democrats. (The gap held in the general election, as well — 77 percentof all women candidates nominated by one of the two major parties were Democrats.)
That said, lower female representation in government is not unique to the Republican Party. There are more men than women in Congress overall and in state legislatures, too. Up until this election, the share of women in Congress had yet to break 20 percent. If the number of women serving in the 116th Congress stays at 123, women will be 23 percent of the total.
But why are fewer Republican women than Democratic women running for office? Political science gives us a few clues.
Being tapped or recruited to run for office matters — especially among potential women candidates. But there is some evidence that Republican women don’t respond to recruitment efforts as positively as Democratic women do. In a survey experiment published in 2016, professors at Brigham Young University found that even if a community leader encouraged Republican women to run for office, they were not any more likely to run. Democratic women were more receptive, however.
This has been happening for a while, ever since the GOP started to go batshit crazy. You can thank Newt Gingrich for this:
A study published in 2014 in the journal Research and Politics defined the criteria for successful candidates as people who were closely aligned with one of the two political parties, who were highly educated and who held a high-status job, like an attorney or professor. The researchers then looked at data on the adult population of the U.S. to see who fit the criteria. Most of the people who did were men. The women who met the criteria tended to identify as Democrats. As time went on, the gap between the Democratic and Republican female candidate pools grew, the study found: In the 1970s and 1980s, the numbers of Democratic and Republican women considered potentially successful candidates were about the same. But in the 1990s, the Democrats began to pull away, and the gap has only grown since then.
The authors of the 2014 study suggest that one factor behind the partisan gap could be the different beliefs about gender roles that are held by Democrats and Republicans. For example, according to a Pew Research Center survey, in 2012, 88 percent of Republicans said they have “old-fashioned values about family and marriage” compared with 60 percent of Democrats. And 21 percent of Republicans said they agreed that women should return to their traditional roles in society, compared with 16 percent of Democrats. These more conservative attitudes about family and women’s roles in society held by Republicans may have a negative influence on Republican women’s interest in pursuing a path that might lead to a political career.
It’s also what keeps so many conservative white women in the fold. They are still in thrall of the traditional patriarchal set-up for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the old “well, I may be a second class citizen but I’m still better than black and brown people and I want to keep it that way.” In other words, racism. There was a time when I might have thought they were religious zealots who held traditional views but clearly that is not the case. They are voting for Donald Trump — worshipping him even. Their “traditional values” aren’t religious. They believe in “traditional” white supremacist values.
And (surprise!) those values also put women in the “traditional” role of broodmare and supplicant. You didn’t see a lot of women marching in that Nazi march. But I’m sure they were behind the scenes making sandwiches for the boys.
I don’t know what it will take to convince these women to wake up but I’m skeptical about it. I have them in my family and they are just as brainwashed as the men, maybe more in some ways. It’s a form of being the “cool girl” in conservative circles. However, the new generation of white women is moving away from that. We’ll see where they stand in a decade or so but I’d be surprised if they move back to the traditional view. But the old ones? They’re gone.
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